Health & Fitness

Florida Hospital Safety Ratings: 7 Earn 'D' Grades, 60 Get 'A'

There are 60 hospitals with an A grade and seven that earned a D in Florida, the biannual hospital safety ratings from Leapfrog show.

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More than 35 percent of Florida hospitals received an A grade in hospital safety, according to the spring 2019 ratings released by the Leapfrog Group. That's slightly higher than the rest of the country, where 32 percent of hospitals earned an A grade.

The nonprofit watchdog Leapfrog graded more than 2,600 general acute-care hospitals nationwide. Its ratings focused entirely on errors, accidents, injuries and infections.

The hospital safety grades are released by the organization twice a year, in the spring and in the fall.

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Of the 171 hospitals in Florida, 60 were given an A grade, 47 got a B, 57 received a C and seven were given Ds.

Oregon, Virginia, Maine, Massachusetts and Utah had the highest percentage of hospitals that received an A grade in the spring 2019 hospital safety ratings, which were released Wednesday, May 15. The District of Columbia and four states — Wyoming, Arkansas, Delaware, North Dakota — did not have a single hospital that received an A grade.

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Here are the grades Florida hospitals were given by the Leapfrog Group:

A Grade

B Grade

C Grade

D Grade

For this round of rankings, the Leapfrog Group's research found that patients at hospitals that receive D or F grades face a 92 percent greater risk of avoidable death compared to A-rated hospitals. At C and B hospitals, patients on average face an 88 percent and 35 percent greater risk respectively.

The group estimates that if the risk at all hospitals was equivalent to what it is at A-graded hospitals, then 50,000 lives would have been saved nationwide. Overall, the researchers estimate that 160,000 lives are lost every year due to avoidable medical errors. That figure is down from 2016, when the Leapfrog Group estimated there were 205,000 avoidable deaths.

“The good news is that tens of thousands of lives have been saved because of progress on patient safety. The bad news is that there’s still a lot of needless death and harm in American hospitals,” Leah Binder, president and CEO of the Leapfrog Group, said in a press release. “Hospitals don’t all have the same track record, so it really matters which hospital people choose, which is the purpose of our Hospital Safety Grade.”

Leapfrog assigns A, B, C, D and F letter grades to general acute-care hospitals in the United States. Each safety grade includes 28 measures that are taken together to “produce a single letter grade representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.” The group uses performance measures from a variety of sources, including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Leapfrog Hospital Survey and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (You can read more about the letter grades here.)

— By Feroze Dhanoa and Elizabeth Janney

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